Keeping up with the literature is part of being a researcher. A few years ago, the #365papers hashtag started on Twitter, as a way to encourage academics to read more papers in a calendar year.

In reality, very few academics would actually read 365 full papers over a single year. #260papers, a paper every work day, was suggested as a compromise and, more recently, #230papers goes one step further to account for public holidays etc.

Two things strike me about these hashtags:

1. They are quantitative, not qualitative. Many of the tweets simply report the paper title and sometimes the link but don’t comment on its findings or relevance. Other than boosting a paper’s Altmetrics score, how useful is this?

‘Discovering recommended papers’ is apparently one of main reasons academics use Twitter. But if a researcher is looking for recommended papers in his or her field of study, clicking on #365papers will just provide a long list of titles across multiple mostly irrelevant disciplines, with very little comment or recommendation.

2. There’s a strong bias toward recent literature. I’m not sure if that was the original aim of the project, but most of the #365papers appearing in my feed were published in the last few years. I had a quick look at 50 of the most recent tweeted papers on the #365papers tag while I was writing this: 49 of those papers were published after the year 2000 and only 8 were pre-2010.

A focus on recent literature is not unique to Twitter hashtags. I remember being told repeatedly during my undergrad degree to not cite anything older than 10 years. The thinking behind this is that science is always progressing and a paper from 20 years ago may have been disproved or improved upon since then. This is possible, but it doesn’t mean we should completely disregard old literature.

Reading only the most recent literature on a particular topic or discipline creates a set of blinkers on the history of that topic. For controversial topics, where semantics, philosophy and methodological processes are widely-debated, understanding this background builds a more informed debate. For topics that aren’t really controversial, old literature is still extremely useful. Reading about what’s been done before can be a source of inspiration for adapting old methods, analyses or experimental approaches.

And this is where using qualitative hashtags on Twitter can be more useful than tally counts. They can be tailored to specific fields, eras or subject areas, minimising a lot of the disciplinary noise that you get on generalised hashtags. They can also be used to encourage broader reading of the literature beyond the 10-year itch.

13 thoughts on “In defence of old literature”

Very nice post! I agree especially with your second point. In economics, my area of research, scientific progress is anything but linear, so old papers and books are often the best. And I would add one more thing: it’s not only classics that are interesting. Given the flood of literature that is threatening to drown us every day, it is still possible to find older, until-now ‘overlooked’ publications which are highly interesting, relevant and whatnot. An excessive focus on new literature can lead to missing true novelty in older publications.